Digital Shadows wants to keep you safe on the net

Paterson's Digital Shadows reported seven-figure revenues in the last quarter of 2014

Jarren Vink

This article was taken from the April 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Nearly a billion people watched the 2014 Rio World Cup final -- but not all of them were football fans. They included various hacker groups planning digital attacks on the Brazilian government, the event itself or its sponsors, according to British entrepreneur Alastair Paterson. And his startup, Digital Shadows, was tracking their every move. It uses natural language processing to filter the torrent of noise and find exposed information before it leads to massive data breaches. "A lot of information is recorded digitally and available publicly, without our knowledge," Paterson says, referring to data exposed through social media, mobile or cloud storage.

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Formerly a developer of risk analysis systems for national governments, Paterson, 33, founded Digital Shadows in 2011. The startup, which has 40 business customers -- including the Bank of England, pharma, oil and gas companies, and a Swiss watchmaker -- uses search and analysis algorithms to track information they might not know is public. It scans 80 million sources in 26 languages, from search engines to IRC chats and darknet bulletin boards. The system looks for content matches with customers' confidential data or signs that an attack is imminent. Flagged content then goes to human analysts to assess. "We found more than 3,000 of one bank's documents in a single cache, including details of their ATM network. We were able to get that information removed before it went elsewhere."

Paterson is now working with the Bank of England to create a testing standard for UK banks. But he sees data security as more than a financial risk. "Reputation is the truth behind this -- there's a strong link between security and reputation."

This article was first published in the April 2015 issue of WIRED magazine